Ganymede (The Clockwork Century #3)

Ganymede (The Clockwork Century #3) Page 4

Josephine leaned her head on Deaderick’s shoulder as she hugged him good-bye. She breathed, “We’re drowning like this, you know,” and she saw him off with tears swallowed hard in the back of her throat.

Two

Andan Cly folded the telegram shut and said, “I’ll be damned.” He slipped it into his shirt pocket, then changed his mind and set it instead on the bar—as if he were reluctant to touch it, but didn’t want to let it out of his sight.

“What for?” Angeline drew her feet up onto the stool’s bottommost rung and looked at him expectantly. She was dressed in her usual preferred attire, a man’s shirt and pants cut down to size. A slouch-rim hat sat atop her head, crowning the long gray braid that hung down her back.

The pilot and sometimes-pirate cleared his throat and signaled the bartender for a glass of something stronger than what was already in front of him. “It’s … it’s a message. From someone I used to know, a long time ago.”

“Must be a woman.”

“I didn’t say it was a woman.”

“If it wasn’t, you wouldn’t be hemming and hawing like a schoolboy.”

“Hush, you,” he told her, not for a moment expecting her to do so.

Lucy O’Gunning slipped a shot in front of him and then put a bottle of whiskey beside it. “One for you, too, Princess?”

“Since you’re offering.”

Lucy poured another drink, using her one mechanical arm as deftly as any bartender ever used two of the usual kind. “And what have we got here?” She reached to pick up the cheap slip of transcription paper, but Cly snatched it back, crumpling it in his hand.

“It’s a note from a woman,” Angeline informed her. “He won’t admit it, but that’s what it is. Telegram came up from Tacoma. Freddy Miller brought it in his sack with the last batch of mail; I just brought it along, ’cause I was passing through anyhow.”

“A woman?” Lucy gave Andan Cly a suspicious squint. “You airmen, all the same. A girl in every port.”

“It ain’t like that,” he insisted. “I haven’t seen this woman in … I don’t know. Eight or ten years. She’s a few thousand miles away, and she didn’t dash off a note because she missed me.” Under his breath he added, “I can promise you that.”

“Ooh.” Lucy leaned forward, planting her matronly bosom on the countertop and propping her chin in her clockwork palm. “Sounds interesting.”

“What does she want?” Angeline asked bluntly, unconcerned by the blush that climbed the fair-skinned fellow’s neck. Cly’s hair was cut close to his scalp, and it was light enough to plainly show the pink when embarrassment made it all the way to the top of his considerable frame.

“She wants to hire me.”

“For what kind of job?” Lucy asked.

“She wants me to come to New Orleans. There’s a craft she wants me to fly, but I don’t know anything more than that. The telegram is thin on details.”

Angeline harrumphed. “Sounds like a trumped-up excuse to bring you out for a visit.”

“She’s not that kind.”

“You don’t sound so sure of it,” Lucy said. She waited for him to down his shot. When he did, she poured him another before he had a chance to ask for it.

“I’m plenty sure of it, and now you’re just trying to liquor me up so I’ll tell you more.”

“You complaining?”

“No. Keep ’em coming.” He cleared his throat again and said, “There’s got to be a catch. New Orleans is a huge place—big port, big airyard. She could get a perfectly good pilot by setting foot outside her front door and hollering for one.” Unfolding the paper, he reread a few lines and said, “All I know is, it’s got something to do with this thing, the Ganymede.”

The bartender asked, “What’s a Ganymede?”

“A dirigible, I assume. She needs someone to take it from Pontchartrain to the Gulf, and she’s willing to pay … but it’s only a few miles, from the lake to the coast. Why she’d want me to go all the way out there to move it for her, I just don’t know.”

“Ask her,” suggested Angeline.

“Not sure it’s worth the trouble.”

Ever the practical one, Lucy asked, “Is it enough money to make the trip worthwhile? That’s a long way to go, to fly a ship a few feet.”

“Almost, but not quite. She’s offering low, asking it like a favor for old times’ sake.”

Angeline smiled. “Old times must’ve been good.”

Lucy straightened up and grabbed a towel. She pretended that the bar needed a good wipe-down and said, “I never been to New Orleans.”

“Me either, but I done heard about it,” the older woman said, her smile still firmly in place—and now with a playful gleam twinkling in her eyes. “I hear it’s a city for music and dancing, and drinking, too. I hear it’s all Frenched up.”

Cly swallowed his beverage but put a hand over the glass when Lucy used her bar rag to nudge the bottle his way. “New Orleans is one hell of a city, or it was last time I saw it. Even though Texas had been sitting on it for years.”

Angeline’s smile contorted into a puzzled frown. “What’s Texas got to do with it?”

He picked up his glass and fiddled with it, tipping it this way and that between his fingers. “Early in the war—back in 1862—the Union went after the city. They thought if they could control the port and the river, they could get a good choke hold on the Confederate supply line. So they took the place. Trouble was, they couldn’t keep it.”

“Texas took it away from them?” Angeline guessed.

“Yeah. The Rebs couldn’t pry the Federal troops out on their own, not for trying; but the Texians didn’t like having the Union presence so close by, so they agreed to lend a hand. They freed up the city in ’64, I think. But once they’d booted out the Union, they had a problem: The Rebels didn’t have enough people on hand to keep the city secure, and the Union wanted back inside it real bad. That’s the biggest port this side of the world, you understand? So Texas could either hold down the fort, or it could withdraw and risk an enemy stronghold right outside its eastern border.”

“So Texas stayed,” Angeline inferred.

“Texas stayed. And nobody likes it much.”

Lucy nudged the bottle Cly’s way again, and this time he picked it up and poured another round for himself and the princess.

“Texas did some rebuilding, and they set up shops of their own to take advantage of all the trade and travel—trying to make the best of it. Nobody knew how long the war would last, though. Nobody knew it’d straggle on twenty years. Even back when I was there, in ’71 and ’72, the locals were fed up with the occupation. It must be worse now, worse by all these extra years.”

Andan Cly ran his fingers around the lip of the still-full shot glass, thinking about the French Quarter, and about a woman named Josephine. Neither of his companions interrupted, but both leaned expectantly toward him, waiting for more.

“New Orleans,” he said slowly. “It’s not like other places, in the South or anywhere else. I mean, all over the South you’ve got a whole lot of colored people—not surprising, since they went to so much trouble to import ’em; but in New Orleans there’s a goodly number of free negroes, and mixed folks, too. They own property there, and have businesses, and get married and make families and run households just like the Southern white people do in other places. The whole state is organized different, and that city is especially different, that’s all I’m saying.” He scratched his head, trying to find a good way to explain the place, and not coming up with anything that sounded right.

“What do you mean, it’s organized different?” asked Lucy.

“Oh, like they don’t have counties and such. They have parishes, left over from when France was running the place, and their elections are different—the people who get into power are different. It’s hard to explain. But as you could guess, the free colored people don’t have much interest in being run by the Confederacy … or any of its allies, either. Hell, being unhappy with Texas is the one thing the colored locals have in common with the Confederates. You’d think it’d give them something to bond over, but that’s not how the world works.”

Angeline’s frown deepened. “Don’t the Rebels want to keep the city open for their own country?”

“Sure, but Texas holding New Orleans—it’s a permanent reminder how the Rebs couldn’t hold it themselves. They talk like it’s about honor, but it’s not. It’s just pride, same as anything else.”

The princess shook her head. “Honor, I understand. Pride, I’ve got a handle on. But sometimes you white folks are crazy as a snake-loving rabbit.”

“Aw, come on Angeline.” Cly grinned.

Lucy laughed and said, “Surely you mean present company excepted.”

“Nope!” She spun off the stool, swallowed her drink, and saluted them both with a tip of her hat. “Both of you are well included, I fear.” As she dug around in her pockets, she added, “And I thank you for the history lesson, Captain, that was real enlightening. But I need to be on my way. I have a train to catch tonight, from Tacoma.”

“Where are you going?” Andan asked. “Maybe I could give you a lift.”

“Portland. But don’t you worry about it, much as I appreciate the offer. I’m headed down there to see an old friend, and sometimes I don’t mind a nice train ride. It’s only half a day’s trip, and he’s meeting me at the station.” She tossed some coins on the counter and winked. “I’ll catch you two when I come back around.”

“All right, Miss Angeline,” Lucy said with a wave. “You have a safe trip.”